A report from this year's two-day festival at L.A.'s Historic State Park featuring M83, Desaparecidos, John Maus, Lightning Bolt, Cursive, Refused, and more.

FYF Fest is like that one restaurant in your neighborhood with an incredible location, seemingly unanimous local support... and an "Under New Management" sign in its window every six months. You could argue FYF (aka Fuck Yeah Fest) is evolving, but to this point, it's been subject to founder Sean Carlson's internal war between his punk-zine idealism and the ambition of a guy who probably doesn't mind being called a "would-be impresario" by The New York Times.

In 2004, the inaugural Fuck Yeah Fest was hosted by Zach Galifianakis and took place at the Echo in Los Angeles; there was no security or schedule and Carlson forgot to actually charge at the door. It then became the subject of a Times video series as a money-leaking nationwide tour. It moved to L.A.'s Historic State Park, took on a suggestive but family-friendly name, and morphed from a quasi-punk/hardcore showcase to an all-out indie rock expo by 2010.

A lot of this works to its benefit: The accessibility of its location means it's the one time per year when most Angelenos will happily take the Metro. And the fact that everyone gets to go home afterwards means the patrons are generally cleaner, friendlier, and less prone to fucking in the grass than they are at Coachella.

Perhaps honoring its history of a... loose approach to actual festival planning, set times were being juggled right up to Friday and even then, the conflicts (Purity Ring/Sleigh Bells/James Blake, Yeasayer/Twin Shadow, Chromatics/Warpaint) encouraged an all-day, 20-minute pick and choose mindset. And that too works to FYF's benefit, since its role as a manageable, affordable, and ultimately local-friendly summer sign-off made it feel sustainable and replicable for perhaps the first time ever.

Desaparecidos

Best Eddie Vedder impression: FYF is still rooted in punk rock, and trying to please the die-hards while expanding its reach is tricky; the prevalence of OFF! hats indicated that innovation isn't a particularly highly sought quality. So yeah, some of the most vital-sounding bands were the ones who haven't released a record in over a decade, but they were hardly throwbacks. Conor Oberst's reunited Desaparecidos proved the scant half hour of 2002's Read Music/Speak Spanish resonated-- even though people are still mispronouncing their name to this very day (oddly enough, even the Latino kids were flubbing it). Are their lyrics a little too redolent of a 10th-grader who just discovered Bad Religion? Maybe. And with an unkempt mop of hair, a drab olive-green button-up, and anti-GMO messages scrawled on his arm in black marker, Oberst looked positively Vedder-esque. But from the looks of things, a lot of kids understood the themes of "Mall of America", "Greater Omaha", and "Manana" as teens... and relate to them now as adults.

Salt in the wound: The food choices at FYF-- including sweet and sour vegetables with orange chicken, pulled pork with onion rings, or a pastrami sandwich-- may help you meet the FDA's recommendation of 8,784,043 grams of sodium a day, but in a place where water's $3 a pop and the filling stations are a 20-minute wait away, it felt like the fix was in.

Lightning Bolt

Dumbest act of aggression: Throwing your keys on stage is a stupid idea on multiple levels. Well, actually just two: Beyond the problem of throwing a sharp and blunt object at someone who's trying to entertain you, keys are necessary if you're planning to get back into the place where you live. With that in mind, let's consider the guy who threw his keys at the stage during Lightning Bolt's performance. Brian Chippendale is a masked man who beats the ever-living shit out of his drums while yelling indecipherably. He is probably the last guy you want to antagonize-- and now he is one step closer to being able to get into your home.

Surprisingly prevalent t-shirt: Jawbreaker

M83

Saturdays=Youth: Last year, I wrote that imagining M83 as a stadium filler along the lines of Coldplay involved some wishful thinking-- and it looks like a lot of us wished "A Guitar and a Heart" into a stomping juggernaut and "Couleurs" into a hot-dogging, call-and-response festival closer. While I'll contend that no band has released a better run of four LPs since 2003, M83 are now one of the best live bands in existence too, largely due to Anthony Gonzalez's vast improvement as a singer and frontman, a perfectly aligned light show, and, above all, the depth and variety of their catalog-- consider they can play an all-banger, hour-long set that doesn't include "Kim & Jessie", "Graveyard Girl", "Don't Save Us From the Flames", "New Map" or anything from Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts.

"Midnight City" has secured a spot on KROQ's playlist, making it damn near the newest song in rotation amidst cuts from the last Bush album and no less than five Sublime tracks per hour. But the most heartening thing about M83's Saturday night set was that the crowd was locked in for its entirety: gothed-out teens and USC bros had an equal command of the lyrics to "Steve McQueen", and a souped-up version of "Sitting" from their seriously obscure 2001 debut got about as much of a response as "Midnight City"-- at least until the latter's sax solo, that thing just kills.

Refused

This is punk rock: I always felt Refused called their masterpiece The Shape of Punk to Come as a challenge to themselves as opposed to their peers. And you know what? It still sounds like no one's really caught up. From the moment "Worms of the Senses/Faculties of the Skull" hit, Refused were still sharp enough to slice your head clean off. And they've got showmanship and style to spare-- they definitely planned their outfits and mic tosses in advance. Much of the M83 crowd stuck around for them, which made sense-- both bands approach the same feeling of being totally alive and overwhelmed with music's possibility.

Fucked Up

Is this punk rock? Dodgy sound on the Spring St. stage aside, Fucked Up couldn't help but sound complacent in comparison to Refused. Though Damian Abraham's stage banter was typically spirited, they ran through the largely indistinguishable, borderline alt-rock songs that populated David Comes to Life, a record that played by rockist rules established in the 70s and contained many of the same codified pleasure points as Green Day's American Idiot. Meanwhile, Ceremony lacked both the cramped-quarters intimacy that enlivened their older material and the crowd support to make their newer plodding garage-rock throwbacks into the singalongs they longed to be.

Feat of strength award: Cloud Nothings stretched out "Wasted Days" to nearly 15 minutes-- combined with "No Sentiment", nearly a third of the band's set was purely instrumental.

Cursive

Best case for a greatest hits album: You can maybe cull a half hour of good stuff from the last three Cursive records. But take that half hour and pull heavily from Domestica and The Ugly Organ, and you've got Sunday's most surprisingly locked-in performance. Frontman's Tim Kasher's keening pitch and intra-song commentary actually translates better with crowd interaction, and whether lashing out at himself on "The Martyr" or the entirety of human existence on "The Big Bang", Cursive's discordant guitar clatter was sharper than it ever sounded on record. Plus, seeing a bunch of teens rush to the front of the stage to sing "CURSIVE IS SO COOL" during "Art Is Hard" is one for the bucket list.

Photo by Ian Cohen

Best Morrissey tattoo in the Cursive crowd: Just know that it had competitors.

Sunstroke surprise: Despite Tanlines' hot singles and killer Twitter feed, they're ostensibly the sort of band you might get a glance at in transit from Warpaint to James Blake. Maybe it had something to do with the sun finally going down, but when removed from the antiseptic and miniaturized production that plagued recent album Mixed Emotions, "Real Life" and "Brothers" became legitimate girls-on-shoulders sing-alongs. It's not unthinkable to imagine these guys could aspire to Cut Copy hugeness with the right collaborators.

Least applicable life lesson: Rock'n'roll has some eternal truths, for instance: If you're going to sing the Japanese version of your new album's big single and the video came out days ago, well... you'd better have that shit down pat. I'm looking at you, Chairlift. The band got through about 30 seconds of the J-pop "I Belong in Your Arms" before stopping, making a frustrated run through the English version and then getting the fuck off the stage in the amount of time it took multi-instrumentalist Patrick Wimberly to announce their upcoming L.A. gig opening up for Gotye.

John Maus

Loosest definition of "comedy": As Jay-Z once said: "Just because you don't understand him, it don't mean that he nice." I get that John Maus is trying to deconstruct rock performance using the same tools as previous subverters like Andy Kaufman, Frank Zappa, the Tough Alliance, Napoleon Dynamite, his buddy Ariel Pink, and the guy who took the stage soon after, Neil Hamburger. So, in a way, he was a fairly easy fit between two blocks of stand-up comedy at the Broadway St. tent.

You see, John Maus is a very normal looking dude dressed in a blue button-up and jeans and he uses interviews to remind people why PhD's in philosophy have little real world application. Except he goes buckwild on some Andrew W.K. shit live, pumping his fist, jumping up and down, and occasionally howling through a heavily reverbed microphone as his no-fi electronic pop plays in the background. I can't knock the hustle, though: If dude can get festival fees for barely singing over pre-recorded tracks, he's accomplished what his records and vastly over-analyzed philosophical musings never could-- maybe he really is as smart as everyone says.

Photo by Ian Cohen

Mother of the Year: Scratch that, Mother of the Century. This photo was taken during Lightning Bolt's set, meaning this kid will grow up to be awesome-- and she'll also have her hearing intact for when people tell her how awesome she is.

James Blake

Loudness wars: As James Blake weaved together vocal loops during the unsettling intro of "I Never Learnt to Share", it looked like I was going to get the same vaguely disappointing James Blake festival experience I've had before, i.e., hearing the vast open spaces of his intricate and ornate studio recordings filled in by infinitely louder bands playing in the vicinity. But oh, right-- "I Never Learnt to Share" gets loud. In this case, very loud. From there on out, there wasn't a question as to whether Black would be competing for anyone's attention. Songs like "Lindesfarne", "Limit to Your Love", and "CMYK" morphed into lengthy excursions of acid-jazz, IDM, post-rock, and dubstep for five to 10 minutes at a time, feeling like less songs and more like brief overviews of any and all forward-thinking versions of music.

Best case for 10-year reissues: This year, FYF Fest hit a particularly rich vein of 2002-2003 nostalgia, a time right before "blogs" became a discovery tool for major labels and when both indie rock and electronic music felt noisier and more unstable. There were more than a few bands proven to be on the right side of history: The caustic garage-punk of Hot Snakes (key song: "I Hate the Kids"), the Faint's guyliner-streaked sulks against the machine, and Lightning Bolt's Olympian pummeling have all aged well.

Worst case for 10-year reissues: Then again, 2002 was also the time of the New Rock Revolution, which mostly celebrated bands with strictly old rock ideas in the face of the encroachment of hip-hop, pop, and the internet. If you happened to be a howlin' blues act with a jones for the "realness," those were heady times. Two Gallants are still keeping hope alive with that strategy-- it's hard to believe a band whose greatest exposure involved covering a slave work song (with the n-word intact) could get more grating, but there they were, going over like skunked Shock Top in the brutal mid-afternoon heat. And while FYF is under no obligation to present the most diverse lineup possible, it'd be nice if we didn't have to relive a time when Aesop Rock was indicative of the only kind of hip-hop indie rock fans were expected to listen to.

Daughn Gibson

Miscellany: Future Islands continue to be one of the most compelling live acts out there, lead singer Sam Herring working a visual effect similar to John Maus' but with actual songs; Warpaint are one of those bands people seem to think are terribly overrated or somehow underrated, but I'll settle on "really fucking good" as a compromise; Wild Nothing's Jack Tatum does not take shit from hecklers; Daughn Gibson looks and talks like that guy at your local coffee shop who has already slept with every barista you think is cute; Twin Shadow is a shining example of how to kindly deal with whatever stagehand will simply not shut that fucking 311 off during soundcheck; Chromatics will always be sold short by American festivals that have an 11 p.m. curfew.